Google Ads and PPC for Excavation Contractors
How We Run Google Ads for Excavation Contractors
Dirt work covers a wide range of jobs and buyers. A homeowner with a soggy backyard, a landowner clearing ten acres for a house site and a general contractor who needs a building pad all search differently and are worth very different amounts to you. The account has to sort them before they cost you a trip to look at the property. Here is how we structure Google Ads for excavation, grading, land clearing and drainage contractors.
Splitting Residential and Commercial
Residential searches sound like "french drain installation," "yard grading near me," "driveway excavation," "backyard drainage contractor" and "lot clearing for new house." Commercial and builder searches look like "site prep contractor," "commercial excavation company," "building pad construction" and "subdivision clearing." These go into separate campaigns with their own budgets, so the higher volume residential side never eats the money meant for larger site work.
Each campaign gets its own landing page. The residential page shows drainage and grading work and explains how estimates are scheduled. The commercial page lists equipment, crew capacity, insurance and the types of projects you take on, because builders and developers check those details before they call. If you only want one side of the business, we simply do not build the other campaign.
Screening by Project Size
The quote form does most of the screening. We ask for property location, job type, approximate acreage or footage, whether the site is wooded or open, and the target start date. A homeowner wanting a single stump ground out will usually self-select out, and your estimator sees the scope before driving anywhere. Calls get the same scrutiny through tracked numbers and recordings you can review.
We then tell Google which leads matter. If you share which inquiries became site visits and which became signed jobs, we import that back into the account so bidding favors the searches that produce real projects. Without that step, Google treats a two minute call about a small trench exactly the same as a call about clearing a 20 acre parcel.
Service Radius and Geography
Excavation contractors often travel farther than other trades, because hauling equipment for a large job pays for the trip. We usually build two layers of geography: a tighter radius for small residential drainage and grading work, and a much wider area for land clearing and site prep. Bids are adjusted by distance so you pay less for clicks from areas you only serve for bigger projects.
Rural land clearing has thin search volume, so we avoid slicing targeting into tiny pieces that never gather data. Location settings target people located in your area, with one deliberate exception: buyers of rural land sometimes search for clearing before they move, and we can include them in the clearing campaign if that is a real source of work for you.
Negatives, Bidding and Budget
Negative keywords carry a lot of weight in this category. From launch we block "mini excavator rental," "excavator for sale," "skid steer rental," "excavation jobs," "heavy equipment operator training," "fill dirt for sale" and DIY drainage searches. Search terms are reviewed weekly early on, because rental and equipment shopping traffic keeps finding new ways into excavation and grading keywords.
We start on exact and phrase match with manual bidding or Maximize Clicks while conversion data is thin, then move to Maximize Conversions or target CPA once there are enough qualified leads. Budget is weighted toward the work you most want, and we lower spend when your schedule is booked out, since paying for leads you cannot get to for months is wasted money.
